Readers and critics have celebrated "Die Aula" as a "great epic fun." Robert Iswall, who suddenly has to give a farewell speech because the Workers' and Farmers' Faculty is being closed, rummages through his memories. Behind the anecdotes from his student days in the 1950s, unsettling questions soon emerge. Unexpectedly, his personal reminiscences become the story of an entire generation that must critically reflect on its past if it wants to move forward. The humor and irony with which the "memoirs of a young man" are told have contributed to the novel's enduring success. Hermann Kant's novel "Die Aula," translated into 15 languages, is considered a classic of GDR literature and is one of the books one must know: a "history and story book" about the beginnings of the other German state, without which one cannot understand its end.